BATTLE BATTER ANNOUNCEMENT!

This Thursday a 5pm EST a mighty and fierce battle will break out in the sciencey blogosphere. I know this because I will be one of the combatants, and I intend to kick some serious arch-nemesis ass! This will not be any ordinary flame-war or troll-con, no, this will be far more violent, far more bruising, and inflict far more collateral damage on the surrounding countryside.

This will be the duel for the TITLE OF MOST NEFARIOUS!!!

Hermitage and I dispute and have fought at great length to determine which of us is more nefarious. Indeed, entire dinosaur armies (my shock troops) have been obliterated into smushiness by her trout-gore spewing bento cannons (her favorite weapon) and I have fried literally tons of her self-replicating bunny robots with the stabby teeth with my mighty Tesla coil cannons! The countryside can not support such vicious and scientific warfare for too much longer, so Hermitage and I agreed to settle this dispute like proper scientists: a paper duel.

Because each of us is rather fond of all of you, we chose an open-source PLoS ONE paper upon which to wage war: Unscented Kalman Sensor for Brain-Machine Interfaces. This way each of you can see the original source.

The battle will not be over the paper itself, but rather for your hearts and minds. Hermitage and I are each going to blog about the paper cited above. Then you, our lovely readers, will each get 100 points to assign between us as you see fit. Whomever has more points after 72h for voting will be declared the winner.

I tap out this announcement in order to give you fair warning. Shore up the walls of your own individual Internet homesteads, put the fine china in the cellar, and get yourself a hammer to beat at us if we encroach too closely to your territory in the blushing heat of the battle.

Watch out, it's coming!

Also:
Dear Hermitage,

Sincerely,
Toaster

Most Nefarious Competition

This will not do.

NOT AT ALL!

Some of you may have noticed a recent poll over at the cave of mein übel-(ekel)-archenemy Mein Hermitage. The poll asked: "Who's more nefarious? Toaster, Hermitage, Ninjas, or Pirates?"

This results are in, and Hermie and I have tied.

TIED!!!

How is this even possible when I am clearly far more nefarious than her!?

So to settle this, we had a cease-fire dinner of cookies and Bento and discussed methods by which we might resolve this. Although we each generated several good ideas, from a race to discover a new metazoan species and then find a way to cook it to a giant robot battle tournament to an air guitar competition, we also found that each of these proposals lacked one critical element to ensure a fair outcome: that of transparency.

Without transparency we could each easily engage in heinous subterfuge and use our respective resources to set traps. As such, we eventually found, the fairest way to settle this matter is a Battle of Scientific Acumen and Wit!!!!!!!!!!!!

Therefore Hermie and I will be facing off in the commons of the Internet and battling through the cyber journal club format, one round only, winner takes title of Most Nefarious*.

But we need your help. Dear reader, we are surrendering the material and terms of this contest to you. Here's how it'll work:

1) Submit interesting and substantial papers to Hermitage and I. For the sake of fairness it should be something outside of our respective purviews (Hermie = Peruvian Flying Fish, Toaster = Immunology).
2) Hermitage and I will publicly deliberate upon the papers and choose one to compete upon. This part may take a while.
3) We will each post a blog entry about the paper.
4) You will judge it, and by extension, us. We understand that some of you may have mixed loyalties, so to make it fair, each reader gets 100 points that they can divide between Hermie and I as they see fit. Points can simply be assigned in comments, which will remain open for 96h following posting.
5) Winner will be chosen by who has more points.

So reach into that stack of papers you keep meaning to eventually read and send them on in. This matter MUST be settled!

*Trophy to be displayed in blog side-bar.